New Title Sequence for Thomas & Friends YouTube Content

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, the 70th anniversary of Reverend W. Awdry creating the first of his 'Railway Series' stories for children was featured.

Growing-up as a child of the '70s, and something of a train-nerd, I loved these books, especially the rich and detailed illustrations. Long after I'd 'grown-up', Thomas the Tank Engine (and his friends) came to television and then became something of a merchandizing phenomenon too.

And now Thomas comes to the interwebs. Commissioned by Hit Entertainment and Produced by Spider Eye Ltd. , a new series of 'comic book' episodes is now arriving at platform YouTube.

I'm pleased to say I was asked to make the title sequence for this series (The first 20 seconds!) back in December and am now engaged in some background artworking for a few of the later episodes too. The first of the new webisodes 'Thomas Goes to New York' is online now, so I'm sharing a link to it here.

My bit is the motion graphics title sequence up until 0:20. Happy Birthday Thomas (& Friends).

2014 BAA prize

Every two years, at the British Animation Awards night, the cream of the UK animation 'industry' gather together for one rare night of celebration at the National Film Theatre. I was fortunate enough to be a finalist back in 2010 when my film TXT ISLAND made it into the last three in competition for the 'Best Short Film' award. Although TXT ISLAND wasn't a winner, it was great to have my film up there amongst the finalists. Professionally I can say that's been the high water mark of my career thusfar...

So it was an honour to be invited by Jayne Pilling (who tirelessly puts the whole BAA thing together) to create one of the prizes for this year's 2014 BAA awards. At each ceremony, the prizes are always hand-made artworks created by animators selected by Jayne and her team from previous winners and finalists. On the big night, the prize-winners each receive one of these unique awards rather than the usual plaque or statuette one might expect.

The brief for the design of the prizes is 'create some kind of artwork that alludes to Britishness, animation and ... sheep'. Sheep, because the acronym of British Animation Awards is of course ... BAA.

 

So here is my contribution to the occasion. I've used plastic lettering and pegboard material left-over from the production of TXT ISLAND to make this typographic artwork. I wish good luck to all participants in this year's BAAs, to the prize-winners of course, but especially the runners-up ; )

Typographic Artwork Quotation Thing

I was recently asked if I'd make a typographic artwork thing as a gift for a friend illustrating one of her favourite quotations. After lots of false starts, I went for a three dimensional assemblage that fits inside a 5"x7" box frame (so this artwork is pretty small). The box shapes are formed from thick watercolour paper and the text is coloured vinyl cut with my CraftRobo cutter/plotter. The font used is inspired by cinema signage, it's called 'Now Playing'.

Tips for Smashing Storyboards

Well I've had a week of boarding and making animatics for a couple of projects at TANDEM, so it MIGHT be a busy July.

I've evolved a bit of a workflow here that helps me get storyboards and animatics together quickly and without too much fuss. Here's a brief description of my storyboard method...

1:
I always start with really rough thumbnail drawings. It's better to work quickly, explore lots of ideas for different shots etc. and not get hung-up on making beautiful drawings. I usually draw the panels in biro, often working in my fave A5 size notebook: fitting eight of these drawings to a page. So the drawings are usually around 7 x 5 cm in size. I fill pages with these drawings until I've worked through the whole script and planned all of the shots and moves etc.

2:
I then scan these in and save the pages as big jpeg images.

3:
I open the jpegs in Photoshop, then sometimes clean them up a bit or add some shading or colour if need be. (see example illustration above)

4:
Next, I keep the images open in Photoshop but also launch Open Office Writer simultaneously. (Writer is a great free Word Processing application and I've already set up a template that fits 6 story panels to each page.) Using the Photoshop rectangle tool set to 'fixed ratio - 16x9' I select each panel from the large jpeg image and use keyboard short cuts to copy these and paste them straight into the Writer storyboard page.

5: In Writer, I then dupliclate/edit panels, type in all of the text below the panels etc. When this is done, I export the multi-page storyboards as a single .pdf file. Job done.

Here's a storyboard page I made for the 'Little Hands Clapping Film'


And here's (a more colourful one) I made for the 'Our Tragic Universe Film'


I hope to update this post soon with some more details (including animatics) and further examples etc. Hope this is useful to someone out there, please feel free to comment...

Some Little Hands Clapping Models

Here's a little 'behind the scenes' look at some of the paper / card models I made for the 'Little Hands Clapping' film. The visual idea was to make all of the elements appear to be made from the text of the book itself.